Vital Parts (48 page)

The current salesman was dressed in a smart linen jacket, navy-blue knitted shirt, and paisley cravat.

“Jagyouar have got it sorted out by now,” he said. “The E-Type will satisfy for high-speed motoring, and this is an exceptionally well-kept exahmple.”

It occurred to Reinhart that the accent could be fake, but the car soon distracted him. The white XKE looked as though it exceeded the speed limit while lying at rest.

“Actually, I was thinking of a convertible.”

The salesman winced. “The drophead? We have an ayolder one, but I'm afraid it has the ayolder three-point-eight liter engine as well. I shouldn't think it would please as much as the four-point-two. And the aerodynamics of the drophead are not nearly as favorable as those of the fixed-head coupé.”

Reinhart was trying to act knowledgeable, but apparently, as with any other discipline, trade, or indulgence, there was a unique vocabulary for sports cars.

The salesman sneered at the hood. “Let me just open the bonnet.” He thrust his skinny trunk through the driver's open window, then went around the other side and repeated his act. The entire snout tilted up at the wrong end, while Reinhart waited in front. The car seemed to be broken in half. The salesman waggled a finger at him.

Reinhart walked around and looked into an engine compartment filled with gleaming chromium parts. “I'll take it,” he said, before having to listen to more imported jargon. His own, from the gas station days, was all-American, and his mechanical expertise was limited to simple procedures like screwing in a new set of plugs and changing the windshield wipers. For any serious trouble he had sent his customers to Joe Laidlaw's All-in-One Service, losing them forever.

Bob Sweet had opted out of this expedition, lending Reinhart the Bentley. Reinhart now awakened the old chauffeur and sent him back to the Shade-Milton with it, and called Bob on the office phone of Sports Cars Unlimited.

“Forty-five hundred dollars!” Sweet wailed.

“I'm saving you money. I would have had to plank down almost seven grand for a new one, but I'd be frozen before it would be broken in. And the car has value. It will still be here when I'm gone.” He laughed boisterously. “I'll need more money soon. That makes five I've gone through already, and the day is far from over.”

“Carl, if you are going to smash yourself up, the deal is off.”

“I know that,” said Reinhart. “You'd be surprised how concerned I am for self-preservation. Being liberated is different from being reckless, Bob. I have this sense that for two weeks I can do anything. You see, my nightmare has been faced and conquered. I realize that my trouble has been essentially a fear of death.” He hung up abruptly. Sweet had deposited ten thousand dollars in his account. Reinhart was amused and exhilarated to see how quickly it went.

After getting his license plates, usually a vile experience with lazy and insolent public employees, but today a flawless episode—a motherly vehicles clerk smiled and wished him good motoring—Reinhart decided to fetch Eunice and embark on a tour of pleasure. They would drive somewhere at high speed, dine luxuriously, screw under the stars in some redolent meadow, breakfast at dawn in a robust truckers' café to the amazed envy of the unshaven interstate drivers at the sight of a man of their own age with young girl and Jaguar.

The car was an ecstasy, the steering so responsive that a cough could send you off the road, the engine guttural in voice and ferociously potent, ten mph to every pound of weight, more spacecraft than automobile. A bastard for a man of Reinhart's size to enter, but once encapsulated behind the wheel, you lived that dream of infinite power without vulnerability, sealed in a bullet. The low roof cleared his head by an inch, the leather bucket was so integrated with his hams that he could have survived a roll without being dumped. He was
with
car, or vice versa, as a pregnant woman is with child. No, he
was
car. He had a long metal snout, four chromium wire wheels, and his time from zero to sixty was less than six seconds. He, who even before he turned fat was a sluggish runner, left the gaudy Detroit Fireballs and Flamethrowers sitting turdlike at every change of light all the way downtown.

Entering the office he jokingly inquired for Doctor Streckfuss.

“I'm sorry,” Eunice began mechanically, while looking him full in the face, “we are not permitted—Carl! What's—Why—”

“How are you making it, baby?” Reinhart said.

Today of all days Eunice was out of it, wearing a pleated blue linen skirt and tailored blouse. Underneath the latter an old-fashioned uplift bra elevated and petrified her breasts. Her hair was pulled tight.

She still gawked at Reinhart. Finally she said: “All right, Carl,
ver
-ry
fun
-nee.”

“No,” he said. “That's what I used to be. Now I am Where It Is.” He reached over and pulled the plug, stunning her electric typewriter. “Come on, let's split.”

She put her hands on her hips. Something librarianlike about her today. “All right,” she said, looking mock-stern. “Joke over.”

“No,” Reinhart said again. “It's just beginning, Miss Munsing. How's your dad the shrink?”

“He's playing golf again today. Usually we spend the whole month of August at the lake, but he just started to break ninety for the first time and doesn't want to interrupt his run of luck. He's a Gemini. I'm Aries. These are adverse days for me.” She picked up a little book and read: “‘If you do a favor for a friend, you may pay heavily. Be thoughtful and see where hidden dangers lie. The celestial pendulum swings its broad arc, bringing a planetary warning to lay a heavy hand on caution.'”

“And your mother is well, I trust?”

“She sneezes a lot, and it is still a couple of weeks before true hay-fever time. She is full of antihistamines, which make her drowsy. When she really gets going, the bridge of her nose swells—”

Reinhart seized Eunice's wrist and pulled her up from the chair.

Her eyes were not made up. She seemed to be fading out.

“Carl,” she said in a frightened voice “your parody is extremely clever. I think it's yum-yum. I really like it.”

“And I admire yours, Eunice, I really do.”

“Well then …” She smiled placatingly. “Let's just calm down.”

He pulled her to the door and into the corridor.

“It's not five o'clock yet,” she said in the Down car.

“Eunice,
I
am all that the Cryon Foundation has going for it. When you are with me, you are still at work.”

“Yes, sir.” There was no content in the gaze of her pale eyes.

“Why,” he asked as they descended to the lobby, “why in the world did you tell me Bob Sweet was your father? And that preposterous story about your mother defecting behind the Iron Curtain.”

“It seemed like the thing to say at the time.”

At the curb Reinhart opened the door of the Jag.

Eunice balked. “Carl,” she said. “Please don't do anything you'll be sorry for. They'll catch you before you have driven a block.”

He pushed her inside. “This car is my property.”

“But I don't know how to
get
in!”

“Face out, sit down on the seat, then swing your legs around.” She did as ordered, but her knees would still not clear the frame, so Reinhart grabbed whatever he could and crammed her in like a bag of laundry.

“For Christ's sake,” he said when he was behind the wheel, “you've been half-naked every other day, switched-on to the hilt, but now, in an XKE, you look like a kindergarten teacher.”

Her skirt hardly cleared her knees.

“I want onlookers to see your creamy white thighs,” he said, pulling up the hem. But the idiot was wearing an outmoded panty girdle, with legs as long as Bermuda shorts.

Reinhart revved up and blasted out with a scream of rubber, snapping Eunice's head against the padded rest. “Sue me for whiplash,” he said.

On the way in to the city he had learned the shift points, and with the four forward gears he made monkeys of the jerks in their routine automatics, not braking as he approached the lights but going down through the box, double-clutching, keeping the rpms high as the speed diminished, then gunning away on the green. Only twice in the downtown area, with signals at every corner, did he have to come to a full stop. He had learned this technique in ten minutes' reading of a paperback called
Competition Driving
, while waiting for the bill of sale to be drawn up at Sports Cars Unlimited.

A mile or so beyond the shopping center Reinhart got clear of all interference and a wide, empty straightaway lay supinely inviting his assault.

“Eunice,” said he. She was still quiet, and he considered calling her a drag again, but actually it worked out to his uses that she retired in the degree to which he was assertive. “Eunice, you are perfectly safe in this car and in my hands. It is a most advanced piece of machinery of monocoque construction, aerodynamic design, and disk brakes on all four wheels. Tuned for racing, its maximum speed is a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Independent suspension and Koni shock absorbers. It holds the road as if in the grip of a giant hand. You are safer here at speed than at forty mph in one of those swollen American baby buggies with spongy springing. Let's have a go flat-out.”

His big right foot grew heavier. The engine's hoarse roar climbed in pitch through howl to scream, the oncoming road became a continuum of immaterial substance, smoke or mist or utter illusion. Only the steering wheel was actual, immediate and hard, intractable, vibrating through his arms and down the spinal column to tingling coccyx. His skull cemented to the headrest, he saw tiny phenomena of horizon swell gigantic, pass in blur, and swoop into the nullity of a rear-vision mirror agitated so rapidly it seemed at rest.

One hundred, threefourfivefifteen. Bugs exploded in white and yellow bursts of liquid shrapnel against the windshield. At the next flick of Reinhart's lashes he saw the bawdy red finger of speed upon the very prick of 125. He had not breathed since 115, but that had been only a millisecond earlier.

An infinity remained between his shoe and the floor, or else his foot had gone right through, his toe would soon touch the carborundum of the road, be instantly ground to a stub: 130. One hundred thirty fucking miles an hour. At the speed of light would one black out? 135. Faster than a speeding bullet, Carlo Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a metropolitan newspaper, is actually Superman.

Reinhart did not have these thoughts—one does not think at high speed, he unthinkingly discovered—but rather embodied them, realized them,
was
them as well as being the car, with grease so hot it was thin as blood, his taut metallic belly-skin seared by the heat of the roadway an inch below, his bearings a blur of joyful fury, his nose cone incandescent. 140.

The accelerator at last touched bottom. He had reached a maximum in enterprise, but not yet in effect. The windshield was translucent with the milk and pus of many small deaths. He rocketed through a void, weightless, silent among the spheres, at a speed so exhausting reason it was one with stasis. He had finally outrun the physical laws, reversed time, and become a baby, serene in the womb.

The sapped speedometer limply fell to zero. The steering wheel was insensate. They glided in orbit.

Eunice opened the door and swung her legs out into rushing space.

He clawed at her, but she eluded him and ran down the highway. The car was quite at rest in the center of the road. Reinhart piled out and saw a steaming pool of water underneath the hood, with replenishment still falling. He broke the body in half, as demonstrated by the salesman, and learned that the fabric-clad rubber hose between radiator and cylinder block had burst. The sparkplug wells were brimming.

Two young guys in a Mustang passed and shouted to the effect that he could copulate with himself. Up ahead, Eunice tried to hitch a ride with them, but a misogynistic, perhaps deviate, spite claims young American males in cars, even if they are quite straight while afoot, and they hooted derision at her and speeded up.

This called Reinhart to sense. He chased her along the barren shoulder, down the drainage furrow full of beer cans, and into a field of fuzzy-topped weeds. She ran on the toes of high-heeled shoes, wobbly but evasive. Though he overtook her soon enough, he could not for some distance put a hand on her, and eventually there was nothing for it but to launch a flying tackle, at the conclusion of which their two large bodies lay prone upon sufficient crushed weeds to bed a heifer.

Reinhart sat up and addressed her back.

“Aren't you the silly one.”

She shivered against the ground.

“There was no danger at all,” he said. “The car is made for that kind of speed.” He grasped her under the arms and got her up to sitting, limp and very heavy.

She whispered: “I blacked out at the intersection. I came to at a hundred and forty.” She suddenly sagged badly. Reinhart struggled around, knee-walking, and smartly slapped her gray face.

“I thought you were a swinger,” he said in sympathetic remonstrance.

A large blue eye opened, rimmed with wild red.

“Are you going to beat me now?” she asked, still whispering.

He stood up. “I don't get you at all, Eunice. You are a young chick, with your life ahead of you. It is a perfect summer afternoon, and I have a fantastic car and a pocketful of bread. This is the kind of thing I thought would turn you on. We can drive to Shawnee Lake. They have a peace-rock-love festival there for the whole month, with the top groups. We can buy all the grass we want and stay stoned all weekend, or organize an orgy or something—anything you want, doll.” He looked down at her, over the silken ends of his scarf. “I'm not square any more.”

Fearfully she peeped up. “I don't feel so good,” she said. Reinhart helped her to her feet. Within thirty yards his arm was cramped by her almost inanimate weight, and when he altered his hold, she fell again. In the drainage ditch she vomited. On the shoulder she shuddered and sneezed.